Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Delmer’s most celebrated broadcast on the BBC German Service was on 19 July 1940, an hour after Adolf Hitler had spoken at a specially convened session of the Reichstag, praising the German armed forces for their magnificent victories across Europe, and boasting of his strategic skill, before offering peace to England. Hitler had said:

  Mr Churchill ought for once to believe me when I prophesy that a great Empire will be destroyed – an Empire which it was never my intention to destroy or harm. If this struggle continues it can only end in the annihilation of one of us. Mr Churchill thinks it will be Germany. I know it will be Britain. In this hour I feel it is my duty before my conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Britain … I can see no reason why this war must go on. We should like to avert the sacrifice of millions.

  Without time for elaborate prior consultation between the propagandists of EH and the diplomats of the Foreign Office, large Tom Delmer settled under the BBC microphone to make a momentous broadcast. In his autobiography, Delmer says it was his first ever in any language, which is not strictly true as he had already done two or three for the BBC. But as a piece of bare-faced cheek, it counts as one of the great debuts in wireless history. Delmer addressed himself directly to the Führer in smooth and deferential German: ‘Herr Hitler, you have on occasion in the past consulted me as to the mood of the British public. So permit me to render your excellency this little service once again tonight. Let me tell you what we here in Britain think of this appeal of yours to what you are pleased to call our reason and common sense. Herr Führer and Reichskanzler, we hurl it right back at you, right in your evil-smelling teeth …’ This shocked the Germans. They could not conceive that such rudeness would be allowed without the highest possible sanction. Confirmation did come on the Monday when Lord Halifax, former appeaser though he was, spoke for the British government and formally rejected parley with Germany.

  Delmer was clearly not a man who could fit into the ‘spinsterish’ civil service ethos of the BBC full time, with its intolerable ‘dreariness and pious unrealism’, but he continued to broadcast on occasion for the BBC because he was both good and quick. In 1941–2, when Hugh Greene’s German Service had to respond within hours to the chief domestic radio commentator of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, Hans Fritzsche, they naturally asked Sefton Delmer to refute his broadcasts point by point. But Delmer’s genius for the medium was finally fulfilled not in the ‘white’ BBC but in the rougher game of ‘black’ radio.

  Before becoming Meister im Rundfunk, Delmer entered into an apprenticeship and alliance with Leonard Ingrams. They had known each other from before the war when Ingrams was ‘the flying banker’ who piloted his own Puss Moth plane around Europe. Delmer figured that Ingrams (the father of Richard, founding editor of Private Eye magazine) was somebody in the cloak-and-dagger world, and found later that he was ‘a star operative on the British side of the Secret War’. Ingrams was, in fact, an undersecretary at the Ministry of Economic Warfare who liaised with Electra House, the Secret Intelligence Service, SOE and later PWE.

  Arthur Christiansen, editor of the Daily Express, sent Delmer to Lisbon in November 1940 where over the next three months the reporter re-immersed himself in the world of Nazi Germany by interviewing hundreds of refugees who had escaped or bribed their way out and were either settling in Salazar’s Jew-tolerating dictatorship, or preparing to sail on to the New World. In February 1941, Ingrams obtained security clearance from both SIS and MI5 for Delmer to join the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office to start work on a new kind of broadcasting, in German, to Germany.

  The BBC employed fewer than 5,000 people at the start of WW2, and they were soon thrown into upheaval. On Friday 1 September 1939, Val Gielgud (brother of the famous actor John), head of the BBC’s Drama and Features department, was in a rehearsal room off Marylebone High Street. He was preparing to direct his first ever play for the new medium of television, The Circle by W. Somerset Maugham, when the BBC entered its ‘emergency period’. There was a pre-arranged code: when the announcers said ‘This is London’ instead of ‘This is the National Programme’, television from Alexandra Palace closed down for the duration. All departments at Broadcasting House except News followed their evacuation procedures and made their way to the regions to escape the imminently expected carpet-bombing of London. Because these bombers could have used British medium-wave transmitters as a navigational aid, the Regional Programmes and the National Programme were merged into one ‘Home Service’. Output was restricted to eight news bulletins a day, government edicts, and hours of Sandy Macpherson playing the BBC Theatre Organ.

  Since all theatres, cinemas, dance halls and places of public entertainment were also closed by government order for fear of mass deaths from said bombing, it is little wonder that bored listeners scrolling across the radio dial for livelier fare in the blackout came upon German propaganda broadcasting to Britain from Hamburg. On 18 September 1939, Jonah Barrington, the radio critic of the Daily Express, heard a voice over the airwaves that he christened ‘Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen’:

  From his accent and personality I imagine him with a receding chin, a questing nose, thin yellow hair brushed back, a monocle, a vacant eye, a gardenia in his button-hole. Rather like P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.

  It is almost certain that the particular voice he heard actually belonged to an improbable Polish-German, MG-driving playboy called Wolff Mittler, but the nickname ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ became wrongly attached to another broadcaster of German propaganda, the razor-scarred Irish fascist William Joyce. Joyce had once been Oswald Mosley’s deputy in the British Union of Fascists, and he sounded less a silly-ass-toff than a sarcastic schoolmaster. (BBC Monitoring called him ‘Sinister Sam’.) Most British households had a wireless licence in 1939, and the BBC audience was about twenty-eight million people. More than half of them heard Haw-Haw drawling ‘Jairmany calling … Jairmany calling …’ at some time or other in the Phoney War, and the keenest BBC listeners heard him most. The government worried about him because he was saying things that you did not usually hear on the BBC, offering criticism of poverty and slums and unemployment and making sneering attacks on the rich and powerful who ignored them.

  Haw-Haw’s snide commentary during the Phoney War pushed the BBC towards finding new voices who spoke more freely. In early July 1940 Harold Nicolson of the Ministry of Information had a conversation with the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Clement Attlee, the Labour leader who, as Lord Privy Seal, was effectively Churchill’s Deputy Prime Minister. Nicolson reported that

  Attlee is worried about the BBC retaining its class voice and personnel and would like to see a far greater infiltration of working-class speakers … The Germans are fighting a revolutionary war for very definite objectives. We are fighting a conservative war and our objects are purely negative. We must put forward a positive and revolutionary aim admitting that the old order has collapsed and asking people to fight for the new order.

  This is essentially what the novelist and playwright J. B. Priestley started doing. His Postscript talks after the 9 o’clock news on Sunday nights between June and October 1940 had enormous popular impact in that crucial year (but were not liked by the establishment). Priestley did not sound like an upper-class chap from Oxford or Cambridge. He was a solid Yorkshire bloke who had seen a thing or two, and he had definite ideas about what kind of broadcasting worked.

  In a similar way, everyone who heard him felt that Tommy Handley (1894–1949) was real and true. The first great star of British radio was someone who could play the straight man or be the comic and yet always remain himself. Born in Liverpool, he acquired the scouser’s gift for backchat and daft surrealism. From his schooldays, Handley spent all his pocket money on wigs, masks and false moustaches, and loved conjurors, drama, pantomimes and pierrot shows. While serving in the Royal Navy Air Service Kite Balloon Section at the end of WW1 he toured with a concert party giving three shows a night to troops and w
ounded. Tommy Handley had a good singing voice and after the war travelled the country doing musical comedy. In 1924, Handley made his first broadcast from the BBC studios at Savoy Hill, so he was in at the birth of radio, the perfect medium for his kind of quick-fire patter. Ted Kavanagh (father of the poet P. J. Kavanagh) was a stout, balding, red-haired New Zealander who sold his first radio sketch to the BBC for 3 guineas and had the pleasure of hearing Tommy Handley bring it to life. Handley asked Kavanagh if he could write some more; they worked together for the next twenty-three years.

  In August 1937, a corduroy-jacketed BBC producer in Bristol called Francis Worsley (ex-schoolmaster, ex-colonial service) had to put together a sound picture called ‘Evening in Cheddar’ from the famous caves in Cheddar Gorge. Worsley livened things up by getting Tommy Handley to join the party of tourists being shown around the stalactites. Equipped with a few gags scripted by Kavanagh, Handley got some exuberant repartee going with the guide, but the BBC drew criticism from scientists for allowing ‘a red-nosed comedian’ to contaminate knowledge with humour.

  In June 1939, Francis Worsley was working in BBC Variety in London, looking for a new radio comedy show. Tommy Handley suggested Ted Kavanagh as the writer, and over pink gins at the Langham Hotel, the trio came up with an imaginary venue for the show: a pirate radio station on a cruise ship. It would be a floating mad hatter’s party with Handley in charge of broadcasting.

  This was a crucial moment in the run-up to WW2. The Spanish Civil War had just ended and Adolf Hitler was all over the news. Whenever the Führer demanded further concessions from the democracies, the Daily Express used to run the headline ‘It’s That Man Again!’ Good title for the show, the trio thought. They hired Jack Harris’s band from the London Casino and the first programme went out live from the big BBC studio at Maida Vale from 8.15–9.00 p.m. on Wednesday, 12 July 1939.

  In the ensuing ‘emergency period’, BBC Variety and its Repertory Company were at first evacuated to Bristol. Worsley the public-school New Statesman reader, Handley the nonconformist, animal-loving Conservative, and Kavanagh the Roman Catholic follower of G. K. Chesterton all got together to think about the new It’s That Man Again!, which was due for live broadcast in a fortnight’s time. What were they going to do now war had broken out? Their cruise ship idea was kaput with the peace. All around was evidence of heightened security procedures, new Ministries issuing orders, government bumf, urgent acronyms. Handley was, as usual, doodling on a pad, when he ringed the first letters of It’s That Man Again! Thus ITMA was ready to join ARP, FANY, MEW, MoI, RAF, WVS and the rest of the baffling initials of wartime. Kavanagh’s idea of radio-writing was ‘to use sound for all it was worth, the sound of different voices and accents, the use of catchphrases, the impact of funny sounds in words, of grotesque effects to give atmosphere – every device to create the illusion of rather crazy or inverted reality’. The surreal half-hour show contained over eighteen minutes of scripted dialogue and they aimed for a hundred laughs in that time, with a gag, pun or tongue-twister every eight seconds.

  TOMMY: Heil folks – it’s Mein Kampf again – sorry, I should say hello folks, it’s that man again. That was a Goebbeled version, a bit doctored. I usually go all goosey when I can’t follow my proper-gander.

  The madcap world of ITMA was like a series of bright cartoons, strung together by the cheery voice of Tommy Handley, playing a busybody in the government, dealing with bizarre situations. The first ITMA, censored, security-vetted, and broadcast from Clifton Parish Hall three weeks into the war on Tuesday, 19 September 1939, did not have most of the characters and the catchphrases that it would develop over three hundred shows in the next ten years, but already ridiculed the officious nonsense that everybody was having to live through.

  TOMMY: What’s this? Order for the prohibition of peanuts in public places? I’ll sign everything that prohibits anything. Get fifty million pamphlets printed.

  FUSSPOT: Fifty million pamphlets, sir?

  TOMMY: Yes, cancelling all the pamphlets issued already. And phone the BBC and tell them I’ve got so thin I’m coming along to join the skeleton staff. Finally, if anyone is doing anything, tell ’em to stop it at once.

  The next show introduced Funf, the serio-comic German spy, a caricature of Adolf Hitler. ‘This is Funf speaking’ became a telephone catchphrase of the Phoney War and helped reduce the Abwehr and the Führer to a laughing stock. The feature ‘Interned Tonight’ had harmless characters like Herr Cut the barber. By November the show was running smoothly. The fictional camouflage unit made everyone invisible – so invisible that Tommy Handley, Minister of Aggravation and Mysteries in charge of the Office of Twerps, could not find his own desk and he was evacuated to ‘somewhere in England’ to set up a secret broadcasting station.

  The nation listened to ITMA right through the war and loved its succession of fantastical characters and topical jokes. You could not interrupt the King and Queen of England between 8.30 and 9 p.m. on Thursdays when ITMA was on. Princess Elizabeth’s sixteenth birthday present in April 1942 was a two-hour command performance of ITMA at Windsor Castle.

  ITMA comforted people by making light of dark times and showing the British that they could still laugh at themselves. The spirit was very similar to that of Heath Robinson’s drawings, satirising official pomposity and secrecy with surreal inventiveness; in 1940 his series of cartoons of Winston Churchill included a drawing of the First Lord of the Admiralty ‘disguised as a swan’ laying magnetic mines in the Thames to discredit the Nazis. Heath Robinson’s absurdity, like ITMA’s, left you with no other option but laughter. Lord Haw-Haw’s aim was the opposite, gloatingly telling people how bad things were in Britain, and how divided the country was, how inevitable their defeat. Poor Mrs Bellamy of Sheffield, who killed herself after listening to Haw-Haw, must count as a small triumph of Nazi demoralisation. ITMA’s well-known catchphrases played an important bonding role in wartime. The diver’s lugubrious ‘I’m going down now’ was heard in every lift and even over RAF frequencies as pilots swooped to attack ground targets. When a rescue party located a schoolboy buried in a bombed house, he managed to refer to Mrs Mopp from under the rubble – ‘Can you do me now, sir?’

  When the German airship Hindenburg burst into flames on 6 May 1937, the reporter Herbert Morrison broke down in tears on radio – ‘Oh the humanity!’ – at the sight, although he did not stop recording sounds and interviews from the scene. That same summer, Edward R. Murrow moved to London as the European Director of the US radio network CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System). He hired William L. Shirer in Berlin, and made his own first broadcast from Vienna during the Anschluss of March 1938. Murrow soon became an authoritative news reporter who could speak directly and naturally to the American people in vivid vignettes. During the Munich and the Czechoslovak crises, US audiences became used to CBS news reports from the likes of Bill Shirer and Ed Murrow dramatically interrupting regularly scheduled programmes, because all news was live.

  It was on CBS radio that Orson Welles pulled off a Hallowe’en sensation in October 1938, using apparently live radio reports from New Jersey to dramatise H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. The faked authenticity of the actor playing the radio reporter – Welles made him listen repeatedly to Morrison’s Hindenburg broadcast and mimic his jerky speech and emotional excitement – was so effective that listeners called the police, and people fled their homes before the Martian invaders.

  By the time war broke out in September 1939, Murrow had put together a good team of correspondents. But unlike Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, who were quick to grant neutral broadcasters the facilities and interviews they wanted, Britain initially bungled its relations with the American radio people. For the first year of WW2, the War Office and Admiralty were unhelpful, the Ministry of Information strangled them in red tape, and Home Security blocked their movements. This all changed with the Blitz.

  At 11.30 p.m. on Saturday, 24 August 1940, during the first general night attack o
n the London region, Edward R. Murrow was standing on the steps of St-Martin-in-the-Fields looking towards Nelson’s Column and holding a microphone: ‘The noise that you hear at this moment is the sound of the air-raid siren … People are walking along very quietly. We’re just at the entrance of an air-raid shelter here, and I must move the cable over just a bit so people can walk in.’ He crouched down to record the sound of footsteps, the shelter door, the background noise of red double-decker buses and sirens in the background. Even though Murrow was using BBC equipment, British listeners were not permitted to hear such live material in 1940. Everything was scripted, censored, and then checked against the script as it was being read.

  The bombing heard faintly on Murrow’s broadcast got worse in September and October with air raids every night. He made his first adlibbing broadcast from the roof of Broadcasting House during an air raid on 21 September 1940, and was inside it during the great raid of 15 October when a 500-lb bomb hit the building while Bruce Belfrage was reading the nine o’clock news. This delayed-action device finally exploded in the music library, killing four men and three women, injuring many others and blowing a hole in the starboard or west flank, five storeys up. Murrow saw the pub on his street corner, the Devonshire, demolished, with thirty dead. His friends and neighbours, Claire and Alan Wells, were killed by bomb shrapnel in Portland Place. Murrow went out at night and talked to people, the poor in the tube shelters, the rich in hotels, the wardens and the first aiders, the fire and rescue services, civil defence on duty, and reported it all in his restrained graphic way, letting neutral America see the dead of London.